What We Eat: Looking at Kashrut Through a Conservative Lens

by Rabbi Edward Feld

What is the Conservative
movement’s approach to kashrut?
It is the observance of traditional
food laws as seen through the lens
of a set of values that is central to
our contemporary understanding
of Judaism.

The hallmark of Conservative Judaism is
its appreciation of both tradition and modernity.
It is a Judaism that lives within contemporary
society and culture. In North
America, it embraces the promise of the new
world, the blessings of freedom, democracy,
and equal opportunity. At the same time,
its commitment to Jewish religious life
creates community, develops Jews whose
values include a sense of responsibility to
others, upholds the sacredness of life, and
informs a personal spiritual practice that
allows an ongoing relationship with God.

To navigate the Jewish heritage within
this North American matrix, Conservative
Judaism turns to the tradition in all
its fullness – to the minority opinion as well
as the majority, to roads taken and not taken.
Talmudic texts, medieval philosophic formulations,
mystical understandings, folk
stories, and more all are grist for this mill.
Conservative Judaism has an approach to
religious practice that is deeply informed by
history, the knowledge of change, and the
multiplicity of opinions and perspectives,
along with a sense of purpose
derived from our contemporary
situation.

This formula ought to be played out
in our observance of kashrut. We need an
American Jewish approach to our traditional
food laws that also takes into account the
circumstances of Jews in an open democratic
society. We engage with society at large over
drinks, at dinner, at parties, in restaurants,
and at home. We Conservative Jews need
not separate ourselves from life by eating
only in establishments under rabbinic supervision.
Rather, we can participate in the larger
culture while maintaining our distinctive
Jewish consciousness. Thus, entering a restaurant
and checking which items conform
to kashrut – what we may order within a
broad reading of the law – is a way of integrating
into society while maintaining our
particular religious consciousness.

It is not accidental that the Talmud
includes many of its food laws in the tractate
Avodah Zorah, the volume dealing with
relations with the surrounding pagan culture.
Food laws in the Talmud are a way
of constructing a barrier between Jews and
the larger society. Roman and Persian cultures
were perceived as threatening. Restricting
diet minimized the contact between Jews
and non-Jews.

We now live with a different relationship
to the society around us, so the regulations
governing what and how we may eat
must be adjusted to reflect that reality. This
is not a matter of changing our relation to
the mitzvot spelled out in the Torah but
of recognizing that many rabbinic laws are
responsive
to specific
social conditions.
Many
rabbinic rules
are meant to
regulate a person’s relationship to society, so
it is reasonable to assume that as conditions
change these regulations must change to
reflect the new reality.

In the tractate Hulin, which deals directly
with laws of kashrut, the Talmud adopts
a more liberal position than the one enunciated
in Avodah Zorah. There, a taste test
is set as the standard of kashrut: Food cooked
in a pot that had been used to cook nonkosher
meat is considered to be kosher if no
taste of the non-kosher food remains. This
standard can be applied easily to eating in
a restaurant that uses the same pots and pans
to cook non-kosher meat and vegetarian
offerings. It demands care and still permits
openness.

But the way Conservative Jews keep
kosher is not simply a matter of finding
leniencies. There is no “Conservative
kashrut.” Kashrut is kashrut, at least as it
relates to shechita – ritual slaughter. But
for Conservative Jews, it is also much more.
One of the hallmarks of the Conservative
approach to Jewish law is its sensitivity to
ethical issues. The recent creation of Magen
Tzedek, a certification that kosher meat has been processed in a way that is both halachic
and not abusive to the labor force, is an
important example. Judaism’s strong opposition
to cruelty to animals underlays many
aspects of kashrut. The Rabbinical Assembly
has passed resolutions condemning hoisting
and shackling animals as a means of
kosher slaughter, so it should be relatively
easy for Conservative synagogues to insist
that their caterers not use meat slaughtered
in this way. Indeed, if Conservative
synagogues brought the full weight of their
collective purchasing power to bear they
could effect a major change in the industry.

On the same ethical grounds, we can
insure that the proper treatment of animals
becomes a standard for personal practice.
Families should buy eggs laid by free-range
chickens. We should oppose farming practices
that turn chickens into factories, housing
them in tight cages, with fluorescent
lights shining on them 24 hours a day, so
that they will produce the maximum number
of eggs with the smallest possible amount
of human labor. Similarly, as much as we
can we should buy the meat of free-range
chickens. It is one thing to feel that eating
meat is necessary, but quite another
to deprive animals of their natural life. We
need not consume food produced through
cruelty. Interestingly, Empire Kosher, the
largest commercial producer of kosher chickens,
proudly announces that its chickens are
all free roaming.

For the same reasons, we should buy grassfed
beef. American cattle growers often
use feed that cows never would eat in nature.
Sometimes the feed contains ground up
blood and animal products, though cows
are vegetarian by nature.

A congregant of mine who had thought
about keeping kosher, but worried about
how difficult his life would become were he
to try, once saw my wife and me eating in
a Chinese restaurant. It inspired him. “I
didn’t realize that it was so easy to keep
kosher,” he said, and went on to adopt
kashrut as a standard for his own life.
For Conservative Jews, keeping kosher is
both easy and demanding. It is an exciting
and responsible way to live in the modern
world Jewishly and to live a life that
is holy.

Rabbi Edward Feld is the senior editor of the new Conservative machzor, Lev Shalem, and is now at work on a siddur for Shabbat and holidays.